WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is encouraging many nonviolent federal prisoners to apply for early release — and expecting thousands to take up the offer. It’s an effort to deal with high costs and crowding in prisons, and it’s also a matter of fairness, the government says.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department unveiled a revamped clemency process directed primarily at low-level felons imprisoned for at least 10 years who have clean records while in custody.

The effort is part of an administration push to scale back harsh penalties in some drug-related prosecutions and to address sentencing disparities arising from the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic that yielded disproportionately tough punishment for black drug offenders.

Although the clemency criteria apply solely to federal inmates, states, too are grappling with severe prison crowding. In Nebraska, for example, prisons were at 156 percent of capacity at the end of February. And in California, courts have ordered the state to reduce the inmate population to 137.5 percent of designed capacity, or 112,164 inmates in the 34 facilities, by February 2016.

The White House says it is seeking more candidates for leniency in the federal prison system. The system’s population has rocketed in recent decades, and officials have warned that multibillion-dollar costs threaten their work in other areas. Of the roughly 216,000 inmates in federal custody, nearly half are imprisoned for drug-related crimes.

Officials say they don’t know how many of the tens of thousands of drug-related convicts would be eligible for early release, but they say an ideal candidate would meet six criteria — including no history of violence, no ties to criminal organizations or gangs and a clean prison record. He also must have served 10 years or more of his sentence and have received a harsher sentence than if convicted of the same crime today.

The Justice Department expects the vast majority of applicants to be drug prisoners.

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